I would like to see a mod where you have a dialogue choice for companions where you ask them to go to the nearest town and sell off gear they are holding (but not sell equipped gear). They would leave for a while and sell it (at a discounted price) and return and give you the gold. I think this would be an excellent mod.

That'd be kinda interesting I guess. Is that really possible though?

I think this is an interesting idea, however I would recommend it be implemented slightly differently.

Allow one of the companion commands (when selecting a vendor) to sell all unequipped items from your companion to that vendor which that vendor is willing to purchase


Broken down...

Issue Order to Companion to "Sell to Vendor"
Items are automatically sold based on:

• Not currently equipped
  
• Vendor has enough currency
  
• Vendor buys those types of items

Allowing your companion to just 'go away and sell things' would break the local economy system built into Skyrim.

Wouldn't be hard. Introduce a dialogue script, have it run when started. Cause the NPC to "Disappear" for a few hours/days and return with money based on the NPCs speechcraft skill. Wouldn't have to worry about merchant money or whether it buys/sells items. It would just remove all unequipped items and give you gold based on the speechcraft of the companion.

I was also thinking of a lesser amount due to the fact you are sending someone to do it for you... adding a middleman. So your return would be about half of what it would be if you did it yourself. This way you would not break the economy of the game.

The problem I can see to doing this is that companions change their equipment arbitrarily. This way, they could end up selling things they where supposed to have equiped. I think their equipping prefference should be fixed first (or make them a different criteria to what they should sell than what they have not equipped right now).

This will be fairly straight-forward to do cleanly once we have the CK. Just add a dialogue option that triggers a container interface, dump your stuff into this invisible container, and then script the follower to walk away. No need to worry about equipped/unequipped items since there's a separate "for sale" container.

I'm guessing that this is inspired by the mechanic from Torchlight?

Actually companions do this in the upcoming StarWars: The Old Republic, and it rocks. However it is not implemented quite perfectly.